I won’t say that Escape from L.A. wasn’t working for me from the get-go – the first diegetic image is pretty stellar shot of the Sam Fuller school, a quick-fire slug of Nazi-adjacent American soldiers lined up against the camera, as though blockading it from access to some dark secret behind them – but the moment where John Carpenter’s fifteen-years-later sequel clicked for me is the one where it seems to completely collapse. When our resident eye-patched libertarian outlaw Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is tasked with rescuing a black box containing US satellite codes from post-apocalyptic prison-colony Los Angeles, he takes a one-man submersible into L.A., which is now separated from the rest of the U.S. and only accessible via air and water. We, however, take a roughly 60 second slalom through some of the roughest mid-‘90s CG you can imagine, Snake’s comically sleek submarine hurtling through an abstract void that is meant to connote “water”, passing by a toxic garbage plate of pixels registering ever-so-briefly as a “shark”. Finally, in a split-second, we rush past the drowned Universal Studios sign, now a lost relic from a forgotten age. The shark suddenly clarifies as a CG travesty of Universal’s great hit Jaws, itself a famously iffy effect thoughtfully used in only privileged moments, and Escape from L.A. clarifies its own status as one of the great Hollywood piss-takes, a mockery that is also a howl of frustration aimed at what Hollywood had done to Carpenter’s medium of choice. The title is not a not a statement of fact but a genuine wish, not a declarative claim but a plea for help.

Judging from the rest of the film, its deeply caustic ambivalence and jovial nihilism, its playful absurdity and nasty cruelty, it is impossible to read this as anything other than a vicious take-down of the idea of a CG action sequence, a curdled critique of the limits of Hollywood, even the idea of making a sequel to 1981’s Escape from New York. The consequence of this ferocious, even callous brazenness is that the film’s vision of redemption is reduced to apocalypse, and that Carpenter’s vision of anything like politics essentially consists of an empty void, but the beauty of the film is that it registers the sadness of a director reduced to that position. If Escape from New York was a caustic scalpel, Escape from L.A. is a libertarian broadside aimed at society writ-large. Gone is the sense of impromptu, even thorny, community in New York, or Carpenter’s The Thing, with its paranoid ruminations on humanity’s capacity for self-destruction, or Big Trouble in Little China, with its comparatively convivial reflections on the inadequacy of Hollywood male archetypes, or Prince of Darkness’s mercurial meditations on the potential for science and religion to work together. The possibility for human salvation through collectivity has no place in Carpenter’s mature brand of nihilism. While his deeply underrated Christine implicitly assaulted Hollywood’s acts of cinematic necromancy, its inability to fashion anything new and need to feed off the corpses of earlier visions of youth and coolness, Escape from L.A. is his most full-throated bite of the hand that feeds.

In that sense, the cosmic uncertainty of Carpenter’s wonderfully underrated 1994 film In the Mouth of Madness was a pivot point. With its harrowing and sublime investigation of the limits of directorial control and the disturbing psychic and cosmic forces unleashed by the intersection of art and corporatism, Madness seems to have opened a portal from which humanity may have no return. Escape both explodes outward – into a brutal, deliberately un-subtle burst of savage playfulness – and implodes inward, into a cloacal vision of Hollywood’s intestinal tract. When Snake’s submarine lands in L.A., the ground immediately gives out from under it, as if it can’t bear physical soil or withstand real concrete, can’t exist outside the false machinations of a Hollywood CG sequence, but also as though the film is plea-ing for Snake to stay on the island, to not return to a world that has no place for him anymore, to appreciate what Hollywood has to offer. In the vortex of chaos, he has found grace, has located the possibility of home.

From there, we’re off to the races, a transparent, scabrous mockery of Hollywood that is also a celebratory account of Hollywood’s genre-hopping excess, from a simply breathtaking absurdist surf interlude where Snake hangs ten with Peter Fonda, washed ashore from another genre entirely, to a hang-glider ride that ends in Disneyland’s “Happy Kingdom,” now turned into a haven for potential leftist revolt that, the film can only suggest, is another illusion of Hollywood radicalism, a fantasy of immediate satisfaction and sudden solution. Stranded in the middle of all this, we start one sequence where Snake is about to punished passing by several scenes of gladiatorial combat, Carpenter teasing a replay of the same set-piece from Escape from New York, before we learn Snake’s fate, a hilarious undercut: a basketball sequence, five shots without missing, ten seconds for each shot. It’s the mid-‘90s, Carpenter seems to suggest, and we need a basketball film in our map to the stars.

More generally, Escape from L.A. film is a work obsessed with the fabrication of Hollywood mythology, from the obvious (Bruce Campbell as the Surgeon General of Beverley Hills, who collects bodies to recover skin to keep his scions perennially beautiful) to more subtle remarks, such as the continual refrain “I Thought You’d Be Taller” that becomes a sort of needling chorus throughout the film for characters who meet Plissken. Snake twice attempts to assault or kill his U.S. government captors early on, reminding him that they know more tricks than he can muster, and that he, and we, will have to learn that we are being manipulated and may have to play the same game to get our revenge. Snake finally learns this in his phenomenally disastrous exit from the film, a blast of cosmic nihilism rarely seen in any film, let alone a blockbuster.

In many ways, Snake has to learn what, and if, Hollywood manipulation has anything to offer him. In a stellar sequence, he sets the stage for an Old Hollywood standoff against his enemies and then devastates the very rules he sets up. Shooting before he says he will, his opponents ae too locked in their Hollywood idiom, in the L.A. vision they still, however loosely, assent to, to know what hit them. The tensions are deep here. There is remarkable ambivalence within the film: for all that the film posits L.A. as the last vestige of possible freedom, L.A. itself is also a transparent theme park, a self-conscious Hollywood vision of absurd that is both celebrated and lamented by Carpenter, who seems to suggest that no other freedom may be possible other than that afforded by Hollywood, that the only forms of freedom we’ve been reduced to are those proffered by American movie fantasies. From here, Carpenter would return to collectives in Vampires and Ghosts of Mars, but both of those films offer little possibility of escape.

It’s not a subtle film, you can probably tell, but it isn’t dumb. When Snake tells the feds that he’s lost his hologram projector, for instance, we’re meant to intuit that he’s lied to them when he achieves a devastatingly mischievous coup with it at the conclusion, even though the film never explicitly reminds us that we’ve been lied to by our protagonist an hour earlier. The film knows that we’re watching, and maybe not watching well enough. When we first meet Steve Buscemi’s “Maps to the Stars Eddie,” he sidles into the frame behind Snake as the latter is resting in placid repose, quietly frustrated to himself, yet also posing in classic Hollywood bearing. He too is a star charting his course, the film seems to say, but he is also being charted, both by others around him and by decades of Hollywood archetypes he cannot fully shake off, and that this film cannot escape from. How else to explain the final shot. Having shut down the world, Russell interrupts his own final moment of solitude, only to catch a stray suspicion and stare at the camera, striking a cheery-nasty pose for the viewers he now acknowledges. Snake, the film seems to know, simply can’t exist as a real person. The only home he can know is an assemblage of smoke and mirrors. In his quest for escape, he comes to realize that he was always-already a cinematic type. He isn’t our savior, and he doesn’t want to be, but Hollywood cinema can’t actually posit a kind of hero useful for everyday life. The best thing the film can do is conclude, to turn this film’s end into a thesis on film’s end. We, the film says, can only be left to our own devices.

Score: 9/10

Motel Hell opens with an absolute pip of a silent sequence, a seemingly offhand shard – as though the film started too early, or we’re watching things sidle into place – that ultimately becomes the lens through which the whole film might be viewed. As the camera fades in, Vincent (Rory Calhoun) slyly and somewhat laconically smokes his pipe on the porch of his mostly defunct roadside motel Motel Hello, the “o” flickering out and the red bathing him in a warm but hellish glow. It’s a remarkably casual, easy-going, even lethargic bit of filmmaking – nothing is really happening, except another moment in this random person’s day in anywhere U.S.A. – and yet the texture of the scene folds us into a milieu and a mood. The font of the credits itself mimics the Motel font in a simple but effective means to suggest that we, ourselves, are now entering the headspace of the hotel itself. I have to say, readers, I was instantly smitten. Motel Hell is like that: it accomplishes more than most films, yet it barely does anything at all.

Before watching Two Evil Eyes, you would be forgiven for assuming that director Dario Argento was the hanger-on. Originally planned to include sequences by Argento, John Carpenter, and writer Stephen King, Argento certainly seems like the odd man out. Carpenter and Romero seem like an obvious match, and King and Romero had already collaborated on the phenomenal Creepshow, a deliriously kooky anthology horror film that fully recaptured the spirit of the EC Comics horror tales. (Carpenter, too, had already directed an adaptation of King’s Christine). The obvious impetus for this film is Creepshow and Romero’s subsequent, lesser Tales from the Darkside show (also adapted into a 1990 film whose best segment also features a fiendish feline), and Argento, who didn’t usually sign on for this sort of thing, may have just been along for the ride.

The script for 1990’s The Guardian was finally credited to William Friedkin, Dan Greenburg, and Stephen Volk , but, watching the monstrosity, it is immediately obvious how many unmarked hands touched and tore the film to bits before its release. This slapdash production is transparently the work of many eyes and voices working at cross purposes, a cinema born of unfulfilled expectations and necessary compromises. While loosely based on the novel The Nanny by Greenburg, the film’s producers invested heavily in director William Friedkin’s history with supernatural horror and insisted that the film incorporate Exorcist-like cosmic tendrils absent in Greenburg’s book (which I have not read). Rather than Phil (Dwier Brown) and Kate (Carey Lowell) Sterling being threatened by Camilla (Jenny Seagrove) – your everyday local duplicitous nanny with a penchant for stealing human newborns – they are the victims of Camilla, a malevolent cosmic force and eldritch, Druidic forest demon who needs to sacrifice babies to her God. Rather than a parable of domestic fear, The Guardian assaults the senses with a thoroughly supernatural account of Christian theology’s Other. Sometimes things just go like that.

The bandages of the film’s construction are plainly apparent watching the finished film. Scenes end too early, last too long, or seem to be missing completely. Ideas are brought up and dropped within the span of a scene, the tell-tale sign of a film scrambled in the editing rhythms either to rush to the proverbial “good stuff” or to recover from a lack of coherent footage. It’s difficult to tell whether this happened prior to filming or during the process, but Friedkin seems palpably divested from the main currents of the story or the emotions of the characters. If, say, his The Exorcist is an exquisite diamond of a horror picture calculating every scene for maximum effect, The Guardian is much closer to that film’s famously tortured, unfocused, misbegotten sequels.

Guillermo Del Toro’s pet fascinations seem to have emerged almost fully formed in Cronos, his debut feature. Despite its less ostentatious sensibility, this is very much the work of the man who would make Pan’s Labyrinth.  But it is no mere prologue. While Del Toro’s later films lather on either special effects or themes which increasingly seem like special effects, they also risk monumentalizing themselves. Despite its eminent craft, Pan’s Labyrinth feels like less than the sum of its parts nearly two decades on, as though it might collapse under the weight of the themes that signal its importance and the somewhat overworked narrative parallels that strive for conceptual relevance. Perhaps it spoke to its moment, but it also feels too strained to work as anything more than an antique to a particular flavor of Oscarbait cinema. And that’s saying nothing of his actual Oscarbait picture, the nearly somnambulant The Shape of Water.

Pan’s Labyrinth might have learned from a thing or two from Del Toro’s first film, in that regard. For all its resonance, Cronos is a decidedly spry, suggestive affair, never taking three metaphors to say what a brief glance or a hesitating pause might reveal. Indeed, the actual metaphor of the film is somewhat opaque, slowly – and without any obvious “twist” – sauntering into a slantwise vampire story rather than plunging in from the beginning. Jesus Gris (Federico Luppi), the protagonist of Cronos runs an antique shop, until he is “bitten” by one of his antiques. Suddenly, slowly afflicted with an almost-unstated craving for blood, the film plays loose with vampire mythology, but it is very much Del Toro’s exploration of the craving for infinite life that turns the body itself into a deadened machine. As one character says of his rich uncle’s desire to find the creature, “all he does is shit and piss all day and he wants to live longer?” That the wealthy uncle De La Guardia (Claudio Brook) hardly figures in the film, and that his conniving nephew Angel (Ron Perlman) who hardly cares about the metaphysics of lineage and simply wants to succeed, ends up figuring as a more central villain says something about Cronos’s general vibe, its appreciation for the deflationary and the quasi-comic, the gesture that undercuts even in the act of incanting.

Released during the nadir of horror cinema as a popular and creative outlet, the early 1990s, when the decade was still in the midst of withdrawal from the slasher film high that quickly turned into an addiction, Cronos slips its fang into the moribund genre’s neck to reveal subliminal life.The creature itself is a clockwork insect, a vampiric inversion of the mechanical and the organic that suggests pulsing life dormant beneath objects that might be curated and controlled for display. The desire eternity is an inhumane way of absolving oneself from the complexities of existence, the film suggests. Rather than hiding death under life’s mask, as most vampire films do, Del Toro finds life dormant in an emblem of machinery, a golden antique that suggests a grotesque parody of immortal life encased in an armor of riches.One can trace the tendrils to Del Toro’s recent magisterial Pinocchio, which certainly portends his upcoming version of Frankenstein, another story of a modern Prometheus in search of transcendence who only discovers his own inability to cope.

That could also be a metaphor for the film itself. This deceptively simple story of the boundaries of life and the limits of death is all the more touching for how surreptitiously and even straightforwardly it leeches thematic resonance out of its story-world, how casually it feels attuned to everyday rhythms and, well, life. Indeed, life masking death is an unfortunately apt description for several of Del Toro’s later films, which too often seem frisky and deranged but ultimately reveal hollow cores (although his Pinocchio is a peach). Vaguely pleasing though it is to watch Del Toro given 100 or even 200 million dollars to aestheticize the lingering traces of our pasts, Cronos alone feels alive to its present. When Jesus gets his first taste of blood in the bathroom at a party, an angry partygoer wipes it up from the counter, leading an undeterred Jesus to lap up what little remains the floor, a moment that radiates even more lethargic sadness due to its casually offhanded manner. When a shoe walks past him, it briefly registers as a comment on the casually uncaring cruelty of the wealthy before it returns to the labors of the story-world. Crimson Peak, with its gothic manse literally sitting atop a field of blood-red dye, a gloriously baroque image that is also a crudely pandering, if amusingly self-amused, metaphor, ain’t got nothing on this tiny pool of blood and one man’s sudden, insatiable craving for it.

All of Cronos’s best moments are quietly insinuating like this, morbid incisions of quiet, quirky malevolence rather than meat-cleavers of meaning. After the “villain” Angel (Ron Perlman) attempts to murder Jesus without recognizing the implications of his affliction, Del Toro lovingly lingers on the work of a morgue attendant preparing the body for a funeral that never arrives. “It’s your best work yet,” he’s told, to which the attendant responds, lovingly exploring the nooks and crannies of the corpse, that there is “a technique to this. I’m giving it shape, texture, color. You have to be a fucking artist.” Del Toro gives himself the perfect metaphor for his own career, and then immediately mocks it. The widow has decided to cremate. Some people, Del Toro muses, just don’t appreciate the craft of death, and the of art of life.

Score: 8/10

Francis Ford Coppola’s deliriously remarkable Grand Guignol version of Dracula, released in 1992, reminds me of Alice in Chains’s seminal muck-spreader of an album Dirt from the same year. In both cases, my love for the object doesn’t always defray the disquiet I feel about the damage it wrecked on its medium. Fortunately, while Dirt and its ilk turned rock music into a no man’s land of post-grunge for nearly a decade, Dracula merely took a genre that was already in the grave and dressed its corpse in Victorian duds. The success of Coppola’s film clearly gave Hollywood a reason to “class up” the old-school Universal Horror monsters as an Oscar-approved variant of the genre. Buttressed by the simultaneous success of Merchant Ivory British period epics like Howards End, the resulting monster movies ultimately traded in indulgences of the demonic for pretensions of the divine.

Divine, of course, means respectable, which, for a horror film, means death. While Coppola’s Dracula is a truly unhinged, discombobulated work, and Mike Nichols’s Wolf, while less than fully compelling, nonetheless attempts its own spin on the wolfman archetype, Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein benefits and suffers alike from its obvious zeal for the material. While it has the eager-to-please smile of an ‘80s horror film, it also has the buttoned-up, primed-and-polished straightness of a prestige period piece. It treats the material worshipfully, as holy writ to study or a monument to bow down before, and in doing so it ironically exsanguinates its devilish spirit. This is a distressingly, unimaginatively literal work, yet it absolutely lacks the texture of the original work itself. In following the letter, it kills the spirit.

The grunge comparison I opened with isn’t just incidental either. Branagh clearly adores himself as always, and that shows both in front of and behind the camera. Running around as the protagonist, he saunters and flagellates like a rock star lost in 18^th century England. His direction is consummate, but, as per usual, his visual and actorly showboating extend beyond loving into the somewhat grotesquely self-aggrandizing. As he would do decades later with Hercule Poirot, another cherished literary character, he accents the soulful and compassionate tendencies of the figure at the expense of their angular and distorted features or their capacity to reveal wider social tensions. Rather than being pock-marked and then riven by societal tensions they can’t help but embody, they beautifully – banally – peer into them from a moral high ground. Branagh himself stares longingly and broodingly before the camera, but this particular film lacks enough familiarity with death to truly bring itself to life. When Branagh first announces himself, the film pauses for several seconds after “Victor,”  as though the camera has been waiting with one hand in its pants for the title to drop.

Branagh is, as he always is, trying exceptionally hard to convince us that he is an honest to God film director – at one point, we even get a half-rate imitation of the famous Lawrence of Arabia graphic match  – but the effects are more deadening than electrifying. The camera pirouettes and cavorts in semi-comic circles to evoke the giddy high of scientific exploration but has little visual sense for the character’s manic derangement or the lingering tensions of Frankenstein’s ego. Branagh reduces a torrent of societal anxieties and energies to an essentially personal conundrum and an individualized tragedy, producing a dangerously myopic adaptation that fetishizes the hero’s body without much to say about his mind. Themes are there, lingering in the shadows. Even the concept suggests a connection between maestro and scientist and film director that travels all the way back to the roots of cinema itself, often described as a “Frankensteinian” technology with aspirations to assemble shots of dead history into renewed collective life. But Branagh establishes these connections passively, not as a matter of intent but a simple fact of cinematic existence. He simply can’t but indulge himself, and it feels like he’s showing off rather than honing in or letting loose. This marks him as a genuine auteur of a kind. It also reminds us that being an auteur is in no way a marker of being an artist.  

Score: 5/10

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II is a thoroughly slantwise sequel. Rather than honoring its predecessor, it merrily runs amok with it. Insofar, that is, as it is interested in the first Prom Night at all. That 1980 film was a first-generation slasher film, released when the genre was not so much figuring itself out as already dying a premature death in the womb. Creatively speaking, at least. Slasher films would continue to thrive in the box office for several years, but the genre was commercially on the way out by 1987, when this sequel was released. While many slasher films were still being released every year, horror cinema was on its way to the grave for the first half of the 1990s, before a revival closer to the turn of the century. Prom Night II treats the slasher era’s wilderness years as a real wilderness, living out a creative hunger to survive just by attempting anything at all. It is liberated, after a fashion, by the genre’s  own demise, as though the relief of recognizing its own poor box office prospects allowed it to explore its own inner urges without apprehension.

Which isn’t to say that the film doesn’t have its finger on the pulse. Hello Mary Lou joins John Carpenter’s 1983 killer car picture Christine in excoriating its decade’s obsession with the 1950s, manifesting the Reagan era’s fetishistic fixation on its forebears as a literal possession by a dormant specter. That said, the film’s visual and sonic cues are hardly limited to, or even primarily defined by, ‘50s cues. If this film has a closer aesthetic analogue, it’s Kenneth Anger’s gleefully perverse explosions of mid-century teenage iconography. Although shorn of Anger’s wry recognition of mid-century American fascism, Hello Mary Lou similarly recognizes the paradox of turning to one’s ancestors for a portrait of youth and rebellion. And it similarly plays critique with a frisky grin rather than a moral scold.

Historian W. Scott Poole makes a potent case for the 1924 film The Hands of Orlac as an aftershock of World War I. Reflecting the psychic tremors of a battle where bodies and minds were warped and destroyed, humans reduced to automatons and warped into psychological and physical pieces, the 1924 film severed a pianist’s hands and depicted the terror of the body seemingly working at odds from the mind that was supposed to control them. The 1924 film was directed by Robert Wiene and starred Conrad Veidt (both of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari a few years beforehand), perhaps the first burst of Hollywood engagement with German Expressionist shadowplay, the surest throughline between Weimar horrors and the rise of the Universal Horror Monsters that would cast a long pall on horror cinema. Perhaps aware that it could all-too easily be seen as an also-ran, 1935’s Mad Love is a nominal remake thatreframes the story entirely. If The Hands of Orlac laments the violence of returning soldiers, Mad Love is very much about those who never went to war, for whom the war was a theater to watch and, perhaps, violently obsess over.

While the original story focuses on the plight of talented pianist Stephen Orlac (played, in this 1935 version, by Colin Clive), who loses his hands in a train accident and has them replaced with a murderer’s (Rollo, here played by Edward Brophy), this version shifts to Peter Lorre’s Dr. Gogol (Peter Lorre), the doctor who performs the operation and is infatuated with the pianist’s wife Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake). Gogol, who houses a mannequin of Yvonne, fancies her Galatea to his Pygmalion, borrowing from the Greek play about an artist that conjures their sculpture to life via sheer artistic ability infused with the incantatory potency of desire. This last dynamic marks Mad Love as a deeply tormented meditation on the relation between creation and control. Rather than a performer-soldier, Gogol is a tragic mastermind-director, longing for something he can only domineer from behind the scenes.

In Larry Cohen’s Q: The Winged Serpent, Midtown Manhattan is being menaced by a giant bird-like dinosaur creature. That, incidentally, is not a good description of it, but it’s better than the verbal description given by the characters in the film. It also has something to do with a string of cult-like murders being investigated by Detective Shepard (David Carradine) and Sgt Powell (Richard Roundtree). It also crosses paths with Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty), a failed pianist turned small time crook (now there’s a career path for you) who also seems to double as a bundle of raw nerves. None of these various menacings really cohere into anything actually menacing as a horror film, but Q’s strangenessmakes it exceedingly difficult to care about superficial things like a film’s genre or the temper it is supposed to have.

Much of that strangeness comes courtesy of the thing really menacing Midtown Manhattan in Q: Michael Moriarty, who seems to unravel the film as he passes through it. A walking psychic tremor of a man, Moriarty’s Jimmy is a human paradox who seems both deeply self-congratulatory and egotistical and essentially lost. He feels like a walking open wound of Method tics, a man feeling out his way through the world. The narrative itself – about a man who feels he has had no shot in the world and needs to command the momentary opportunity he has stumbled into, but doesn’t really know how to – reflects the performative style, which seems obsessed with controlling the space and the audience even as it is barely registering any effort. It’s a truly unmanicured performance, blistering with raw nervous energy and chaotic inner expressiveness. The most unsettling scene has nothing to do with the titular serpent but, rather, the camera’s own serpentine moves around Moriarty as he sidles up sinisterly to a piano less to tickle than prick the ivories on a frankly demented little ditty. It’s a remarkable scene, one in which the narrative content is essentially trivial but the form of the scene and its placement in the film evoke a much darker story.